Understanding and expressing ‘‘Risk’’

Making a decision to adopt or reject an intervention based on the evidence driven from medical literature, requires a clear understanding of the risk of adverse outcome and its relation (association) to this intervention. For example to choose a particular anti-arrythemic drug therapy may be based on the relation of this drug in reducing the risk of mortality. Expressing this concept might be done in several methods. Surprisingly, these different methods for expressing the same fact may lead to somewhat different understanding (and hence decisions) by the health practitioners.